Hybrid Algorithm for Distributed Mobility Management

Abstract

The Internet was originally designed for stationary (static) nodes (i.e. computers, laptops). With the advancement of mobile nodes (such as smartphones and tablets) that have wireless internet access capability, the original design of the Internet is no longer sufficient. These mobile nodes are capable of communicating while moving and changing their point of attachment (roaming) in the Internet. To maintain communication session(s) continuity for these mobile nodes, the Internet needs mobility management mechanisms. The main mobility management protocols standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) are mobile IP (MIPv6), proxy MIP (PMIPv6) and Host Identity Protocol (HIP). The architectural structures of these protocols employ a centralized mobility anchor to manage the mobility of the mobile nodes in the control and data planes, respectively, however, these protocols have many limitations such as single point of failure, triangular routing problem, long handover latency and packet loss. IETF engineers claimed that these problems can be addressed by moving to a flat architecture, adopting a Distributed Mobility Management (DMM) system, where the centralized anchor is removed and the mobility management functionsare distributed to different networks elements, brought to the edge of the networks, which is closer to the mobile nodes(MN). However, to date, mobilitymanagement schemes that have been developed based on the DMM concepts are still in the preliminary stages and inherits the same problems from the centralized approach and there is no current standard in place. The thesis proposes a novel hybrid algorithmcompletely built on Host Identity Protocol (HIP), hereafter called (HADMM) thatcombinestwo of leading contenders schemes proposed in [47] and [51] as an enhanced scheme proposed in [50], respectively to work in a distributed manner, in order to overcome their problems and limitations. OMNeT++ ver 4.0 and HIPSim++ simulators are used to model HADMMto evaluate the handover performance, measuring the handover delay, packet loss and signaling overhead, the simulation results demonstrated that HADMM has better handover performance compared to aforementionedscheme [47]. Analytical analysis evidenced that HADMM has addressed all the limitations experienced by the scheme proposed in [51]. To the author's best knowledge HADMM is the firstDMM algorithm completely built on HIP layer.